Infection Prevention For Your Safety

Sometimes patients are concerned about the potential for illnesses to be spread in medical or dental facilities. Given the large numbers of people, and the presence of saliva and blood, this is a very important concern. When it comes to infection prevention, we always err on the side of caution. For us, this means that all staff and patients are considered potential sources of infection. Consequently, we pursue thorough disinfection and sterilisation procedures after every visit, assuming any patient could have been highly contagious. This protects all subsequent patients in our office.

To achieve our safety goals, all staff members wear surgical gloves and waterproof “SARS-rated” masks when working in a patient’s mouth. All soaps used in the office are therapeutic disinfectants. Additionally you will find waterless hand disinfectants throughout the office.

See for yourself
At Humber Valley Dental, we believe very strongly in the importance of infection prevention and have chosen to take numerous steps to protect you and our other patients. We’d like to show you just how thorough we are:

The most important concern in infection control is the instruments we use. All instruments that come into contact with your mouth have been thoroughly sterilised.

In addition to sterilising hand explorers, mirrors, and drill bits, we also put all air and water syringes, suction handles and tips, and the hand pieces that power the drill in the autoclave for sterilisation. This takes more time, and our equipment needs to be replaced more often, but we think it is the right thing to do. Basically everything that we use in your mouth is either sterilised in our autoclave, or disposed of.

To ensure our autoclave is working properly at all times, we include a test strip in every load that we sterilise. In addition to test strips in every load, we have the effectiveness of our autoclave tested every month by an outside lab.

It is also important to minimise the risk of infections being passed by the surfaces that you, the dentist, the assistant or the hygienist touch. Because we can’t sterilise things like the dental chair, counter tops, computer keyboards or phone handles in an autoclave, surfaces that get touched are cleaned with a disinfectant after every patient.

Because disinfection solutions are not 100% effective, frequently touched surfaces also get an extra plastic wrap, which is changed after each patient.

Infection prevention in any medical setting is very important for your safety. We take it very seriously at Humber Valley Dental.